Facsimile ("fax" or "faxing") transmission of documents has in the last ten-years become a favored method of transmission of business documents. Customers fax product order forms with their credit card numbers to all sorts of businesses, such as catalogue retailers and hotels. Lawyers fax documents with privileged and confidential information to other lawyers and their clients. Patients fax their medical history and descriptions of their health problems to their doctors. Accountants fax information regarding accounts, costs and profits to their client businesses. Business people fax documents regarding ongoing negotiations for deals, acquisitions and mergers to other parties engaged in confidential negotiations. Many of the documents sent by facsimile transmission contain confidential information intended to be read only by the addressee of document.
When documents are faxed they are often not sent directly to the addressee, but rather the documents are sent to a facsimile machine in the same office as the addressee, to a location near the addressee or to a location where the addressee is expected to be in the near future. The addressee often does not stand by the facsimile machine as the document is printed from the machine and is often not the person who retrieves the document from the facsimile machine. Facsimile machines are in hotels, convenience stores, business service centers, airport lobbies, government centers, mailrooms of large offices, the receptionist station of small offices, and a wide variety of other locations. Facsimile machines are often located where passersby may read fax documents as the documents print out from the facsimile machine. Moreover, once the faxed document is printed, it is usually temporarily stored where other people who were not intended to read the document can pick up and read the document. A facsimile received in the mailroom of a large office may be read by anyone in the mailroom, and must be at least partially read by the mailroom staff who routes the document to its addressee. Similarly, faxed documents may be read by the hotel staff and by persons checking into a hotel who happen to stand near the facsimile machine. Accordingly, there is a potential for unauthorized persons reading documents received by facsimile when the machine is located where persons, other than the addressee, may read the document as it prints from the machine.
Confidential documents are routinely transmitted by facsimile. The confidentiality of a document as it prints out of a facsimile machine is usually in jeopardy because the document may be read by unauthorized persons as the document is output from the machine. The potential for confidential information being leaked to persons not intended to receive the information is particularly great where the facsimile machine is located in a public or semi-public place, such as in a hotel, business services store, mailroom of a large office, a government center, and in an airport lobby. Accordingly, there has been a long standing need to ensure the confidentiality of faxed documents by preventing unauthorized persons from reading documents being printed from a facsimile machine.
Others systems for preserving the confidentiality of a document printing from a facsimile machine have been proposed and may exist. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,255,106 discloses a confidential facsimile machine that applies a cover sheet to a faxed document and seals the cover sheet to each page of the document with adhesive. Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 5,421,779, discloses a paper pull-tab that reveals a portion of a facsimile document, where the disclosed portion identifies the addressee of the document. U.S. Pat. No. 4,701,233, discloses using a folder and sealing machine to fold each page of a faxed document and seal the folded document. None of these techniques disclose or suggest automatically enclosing an entire received facsimile document in an envelope or sealing the envelope with pressure sealing cohesives.
The present invention relates to a business form assembly for enclosing received facsimile documents in a sealed envelope, and a method for assembling and sealing the envelope and facsimile documents. In a preferred embodiment, the form assembly includes front and back envelope sheets, at least one of which has a border with a pressure sealing cohesive pattern. The pattern of the pressure sealing cohesive is optimized to reduce cohesive costs, reduce the thickness of the sheets due to adhesives and ensure proper sealing of the envelope. For example, the shape and spacing of cohesive spots along horizontal edges of the sheet may be different than those of the spots along the vertical edges due to improved performance of the sheets. Further, each envelope sheet has a center section that is opaque to prevent persons from seeing through the envelope sheets to read documents enclosed in the envelope. The front and back envelope sheets are substantially larger in their length and width dimensions than the dimensions of the sheets of a facsimile document.
A pressure sealing apparatus may be used to arrange the envelope form assembly around a faxed document. The pressure sealing assembly stores front and back envelope sheets in a paper tray or trays. The front and back envelope sheets may be identical and retrieved from one tray. Alternatively, the front and back envelope sheets may be different, such as only one of the front and back sheets includes cohesive, and the front and back sheets are retrieved from different trays. When a faxed document ("fax") is transferred to the pressure sealing device, a front and a back envelope sheet are assembled around the faxed document such that the fax is sandwiched between the envelope sheets. The envelope sheets are substantially larger than the fax, so that a cohesive coated border of at least one of the sheets extends beyond the faxed document. The assembled envelope sheets and faxed document are moved through the pressure sealer to, for example, first seal the left and right sides of the envelope sheets together. Then, the top and bottom edges of the envelope are sealed together to seal the envelope around each of its four sides and secure the faxed document in a sealed, confidential envelope. In addition, a printer associated with the pressure sealing device or facsimile machine may print on the outside of one or both of the envelope sheets the name of the intended addressee of the faxed document.
The sealed envelope is delivered to the intended addressee based on the name and possibly other indicia printed on the outside of the envelope. The envelope sheets may include a perforated strip along one edge to facilitate opening of the envelope by tearing along the strip. Accordingly, the faxed document is sealed in an envelope by the pressure sealing device to prevent a bystander near the facsimile machine from reading the document after it has printed and exited from the facsimile machine.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a confidential facsimile reception system that employs a sealed envelope for faxed documents. It is another object of the present invention to provide a secure envelope formed from flat and unfolded sheets that are relatively inexpensive and easy to handle. A further object of the present invention is to incorporate pressure seal technology to form and seal envelopes around a confidential document, because pressure seal cohesives are not tacky prior to activation and do not require heat or moisture for activation. In addition, pressure seal cohesives may be applied to envelope sheets without concern that the cohesives will activate due to dampness or heat applied to the sheets prior to their assembly as envelopes. There is no concern with contaminating the imaging media or components within the device used to print the variable information on the pressure seal cover sheets. These objects and others are satisfied by the present invention that is described in greater detail in connection with the attached figures.